Those of us viewing the Iran-Contragate
hearings, then being broadcast live on TV, had our curiosity peaked when
one committee member began inquiring about an article alleging secret
White House plans to suspend the Constitution.

We were even more puzzled when committee
chair Daniel Inouye interrupted him demanding all discussion on that
question take place in closed session, out of public hearing.

Not content to wonder, I researched the
original article, transcribed it, and now present it to you for your
urgent consideration. You have a right to read this. In fact, you'd better
know about it because it's about secret White House plans to remove your
rights by SUSPENDING OUR UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. It's about a
government which we, the people, did NOT elect but which has gained power
nonetheless.

What follows is not the whole story but a
crucial and overlooked part of it. Read "between the lines" and
very carefully. This is not some paranoid's nightmare or some fanatic's
fantasy. This is reality in the Reagan White House.

---***---

Please copy this article and circulate it
among your friends and co-workers. If George Bush gets into the White
House, we'll have "elected," or had selected for us, precisely
the same carnivorous crew comprising The Secret Government referred to in
this article.

---***---

First, I offer three appropriate quotes
which provide a certain perspective in which to view what follows. Then, I
present the "sidebar" articles which summarized and accompanied
the main article. Finally, I give you the complete text of the original
article, unedited and uncensored. While local papers ignored this historic
article or presented only extracts from it, none of them gave you this,
the entire text.

---***---

The following did not appear with the
original article but they provide a certain appropriate perspective on it:

"Perception of reality is sometimes
more important than reality itself." -Henry
Kissinger

"He who controls the past, controls
the future. He who controls the present, controls the past." -O'Brian,
the dictator in George Orwell's novel "1984"

"If you don't like the news, go out
and make some of your own!" -Scoop Nisker

A CONTINGENCY plan to suspend
Constitution and impose martial law in United States in case of nuclear
war or national rebellion.

1985 VISIT to Libya by William Wilson,
then U.S. ambassador to Vatican and close Reagan friend, to meet with
Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

HAVING ROUTES of sophisticated
surveillance satellites altered to follow Soviet ships around world.

LAUNCHING of spy aircraft on secret
missions over Cuba and Nicaragua.

PROPOSAL in 1981 to provide covert
support of anti- Sandinista groups that fled Nicaragua after Sandinista
revolution in 1979.

DISSEMINATION of information that cast
Nicaragua as threat to neighbors and United States.

---***---

Before Reagan was elected, campaign aides
who became the president's top advisers carried out these secret
activities:

CREATION in 1980 of October Surprise
Group to monitor President Carter's negotiations with Iran for release of
52 American hostages. Group met with man who claimed to represent Iran and
who offered to release hostages to Reagan. Offer declined, officials say.

What follows is the complete text of the
original article as printed in the Miami Herald for July 5, 1987:

REAGAN AIDES AND THE 'SECRET' GOVERNMENT

by ALFONSO CHARDY, HERALD WASHINGTON
BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- Some of President Reagan's
top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the
traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan
took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have
concluded.

Investigators believe that the advisers'
activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to
the contras now under investigation.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example,
helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the
event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread
internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion
abroad.

When the attorney general at the time,
William French Smith, learned of the proposal, he protested in writing to
North's boss, then-national security adviser Robert McFarlane.

The advisers conducted their activities
through secret contacts throughout the government with persons who acted
at their direction but did not officially report to them.

The activities of those contacts were
coordinated by the National Security Council, the officials and
investigators said.

There appears to have been no formal
directive for the advisers' activities, which knowledgeable sources
described as a parallel government.

In a secret assessment of the activities,
the lead counsel for the Senate Iran-contra committee called it a
"secret government-within-a-government."

The arrangement permitted Reagan
administration officials to claim that they were not involved in
controversial or illegal activities, the officials said.

"It was the ultimate plausible
deniability," said a well-briefed official who has served the Reagan
administration since 1982 and who often collaborated on covert assistance
to the Nicaraguan contras.

The roles of top-level officials and of
Reagan himself are still not clear. But that is expected to be a primary
topic when North appears before the Iran-contra committees beginning
Tuesday. Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh also is believed to be trying
to prove in his investigation of the Iran-contra affair that government
officials engaged in a criminal conspiracy.

ADVISERS FORMED SHADOW GOVERNMENT,
PROBERS SAY

Much of the time, Cabinet secretaries and
their aides were unaware of the advisers' activities. When they
periodically detected operations, they complained or tried to derail them,
interviews show.

But no one ever questioned the activities
in a broad way, possibly out of a belief that the advisers were operating
with presidential sanction, officials said.

Reagan did know of or approve at least
some of the actions of the secret group, according to previous accounts by
aides, friends and high-ranking foreign officials.

One such case is the 1985 visit to Libya
by William Wilson, then-U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and a close Reagan
friend, to meet with Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi, officials said
last week. Secretary of State George Shultz rebuked Wilson, but the
officials said Reagan knew of the trip in advance.

The heart of the secret structure from
1983 to 1986 was North's office in the Old Executive Office Building
adjacent to the White House, investigators believe.

North's influence within the secret
structure was so great, the sources said, that he was able to have the
orbits of sophisticated surveillance satellites altered to follow Soviet
ships around the world, call for the launching of high-flying spy aircraft
on secret missions over Cuba and Nicaragua and become involved in
sensitive domestic activities.

Many initiatives

Others in the structure included some of
Reagan's closest friends and advisers, including former national security
adviser William Clark, the late CIA Director William Casey and Attorney
General Edwin Meese, officials and investigators said.

Congressional investigators said the Iran
deal was just one of the group's initiatives. They say exposure of the
unusual arrangement may be the legacy of their inquiry.

"After we establish that a policy
decision was made at the highest levels to transfer responsibility for
contra support to the NSC..., we favor examining how that decision was
implemented," wrote Arthur Liman, chief counsel of the Senate
committee, in a secret memorandum to panel leaders Sens. Daniel Inouye,
D-Hawaii, and Warren Rudman, R- N.H., before hearings began May 5.

"This is the part of the story that
reveals the whole secret government-within-a-government, operated from the
[Executive Office Building] by a Lt. Col., with its own army, air force,
diplomatic agents, intelligence operatives and appropriations
capacity," Limon wrote in the memo, parts of which were shared with
The Herald.

A spokesman for Liman declined comment
but did not dispute the memo's existence.

A White House official rejected the
notion that any of Reagan's advisers were operating secretly.

"The president has constantly
expressed his foreign policy positions to the public and has consulted
with the Congress," the official said.

Began in 1980

Congressional investigators and current
and former officials interviewed -- members of the CIA, State Department
and Pentagon -- said they still do not have a full record of the impact of
the the advisers' activities.

But based on investigations and personal
experience, they believe the secret governing arrangement traces its roots
to the last weeks of Reagan's 1980 campaign.

Officials say the genesis may have been
an October 1980 decision by Casey, Reagan's campaign manager and a former
officer in the World War II precursor of the CIA, to create an October
Surprise Group to monitor Jimmy Carter's feverish negotiations with Iran
for the release of 52 American hostages.

The group, led by campaign foreign policy
adviser Richard Allen, was founded out of concern Carter might pull off an
"October surprise" such as a last-minute deal for the release of
the hostages before the Nov. 4 election. One of the group's first acts was
a meeting with a man claiming to represent Iran who offered to release the
hostages to Reagan.

Allen -- Reagan's first national security
adviser-- and another campaign aide, Laurence Silberman, told The Herald
in April of the meeting. they said McFarlane, then a Senate Armed Services
Committee aide, arranged and attended it. McFarlane later became Reagan's
national security adviser and played a key role in the Iran-contra affair.
Allen and Silberman said they rejected the offer to release the hostages
to Reagan.

Briefing book theft

Congressional aides now link another
well-known campaign incident -- the theft of confidential briefing
materials from Carter's campaign before the Oct. 28, 1980, Carter-Reagan
debate -- to the same group of advisers.

They believe that Casey obtained the
briefing materials and passed them to James Baker, another top Reagan
campaign aide, who was White House chief of staff in Reagan's first term.

Once Reagan was sworn in, the group moved
quickly to set itself up, officials said. Within months, the advisers were
clashing with officials in the traditional agencies.

Six weeks after Reagan was sworn in,
apparently over State Department objections, then-CIA director Casey
submitted a proposal to Reagan calling for covert support of anti-Sandinista
groups that had fled Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution.

[THE IRAN-CONTRA CONNECTION: NORTH HAD
BIG ROLE IN INNER CIRCLE, INVESTIGATORS SAY]

It is still unclear whether Casey cleared
the plan with Reagan. But In November 1981 the CIA secretly flew an
Argentine military leader, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, to Washington to devise
a secret agreement under which Argentine military officers trained
Nicaraguan rebels, according to an administration official familiar with
the agreement.

About the same time, North completed his
transfer to the NSC from the Marine Corps. Those who worked with North in
1981 remember his first assignments as routine, although not unimportant.

North, they recalled, was briefly
assigned to carry the "football," the briefcase containing the
secret contingency plans for fighting a nuclear war, which is taken
everywhere the president goes. North later widened his assignment to cover
national crisis contingency planning. In that capacity he became involved
with the controversial national crisis plan drafted by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.

NATIONAL CRISIS PLAN

From 1982 to 1984, North assisted FEMA,
the U.S. government's chief national crisis-management unit, in revising
contingency plans for dealing with nuclear war, insurrection or massive
military mobilization.

North's involvement with FEMA set off the
first major clash between the official government and the advisers and led
to the formal letter of protest in 1984 from then- Attorney General Smith.

Smith was in Europe last week and could
not be reached for comment.

But a government official familiar with
North's collaboration with FEMA said then-Director Louis O. Guiffrida, a
close friend of Meese's, mentioned North in meetings during that time as
FEMA's NSC contact.

Guiffrida could not be reached for
comment, but FEMA spokesman Bill McAda confirmed the relationship.

"Officials of FEMA met with Col.
North during 1982 to 1984," McAda said. "These meetings were
appropriate to Col. North's duties with the National Security Council and
FEMA's responsibilities in certain areas of national security."

FEMA's clash with Smith occurred over a
secret contingency plan that called for suspension of the Constitution,
turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military
commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial
law during a national crisis.

The plan did not define national crisis,
but it was understood to be nuclear war, violent and widespread internal
dissent or national opposition against a military invasion abroad.

PLAN WAS PROTESTED

The official said the contingency plan
was written as part of an executive order or legislative package that
Reagan would sign and hold within the NSC until a severe crisis arose.

The martial law portions of the plan were
outlined in a June 30, 1982, memo by Guiffrida's deputy for national
preparedness programs, John Brinkerhoff. A copy of the memo was obtained
by The Herald.

The scenario outlined in the Brinkerhoff
memo resembled somewhat a paper Guiffrida had written in 1970 at the Army
War College in Carlisle, Pa., in which he advocated martial law in case of
a national uprising by black militants. The paper also advocated the
roundup and transfer to "assembly centers or relocation camps"
of at least 21 million "American Negroes."

When he saw the FEMA plans, Attorney
General Smith became alarmed. He dispatched a letter to McFarlane Aug. 2,
1984 lodging his objections and urging a delay in signing the directive.

"I believe that the role assigned to
the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order
exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency
preparedness," Smith said in the letter to McFarlane, which The
Herald obtained. "This department and others have repeatedly raised
serious policy and legal objections to the creation of an 'emergency czar'
role for FEMA."

It is unclear whether the executive order
was signed or whether it contained the martial law plans. Congressional
sources familiar with national disaster procedures said they believe
Reagan did sign an executive order in 1984 that revised national military
mobilization measures to deal with civilians in case of nuclear war or
other crisis.

ORCHESTRATED NEWS LEAKS

Around the time that issue was producing
fireworks with the administration, McFarlane and Casey reassigned North
from national crisis planning to international covert management of the
contras. The transfer came after North took a personal interest, realizing
that neither the State Department nor any other government agency wanted
to handle the issue after it became clear early in 1984 that Congress was
moving to bar official aid to the rebels.

The new assignment, plus North's natural
organizational ability, creativity and the sheer energy he dedicated to
the issue, gradually led to an expansion of his power and stature within
the covert structure, officials and investigators believe.

Meese also was said to have played a role
in the secret government, investigators now believe, but his role is less
clear.

Meese sometimes referred private American
citizens to the NSC so they could be screened and contacted for soliciting
support for the Nicaraguan contras.

One of those supporters, Philip Mabry of
Fort Worth, told The Herald earlier this year that in 1983 he was told by
fellow conservatives in Texas to contact Meese, then White House
counselor, if he wanted to help the contras. After he contacted Meese's
office, Mabry received a letter from Meese obtained by The Herald advising
him that his name had been given to the "appropriate people."

Shortly thereafter, Mabry said, a woman
who identified herself as Meese's secretary gave him the name and phone
number of another NSC secretary who, in turn, gave him North and his
secretary, Fawn Hall, as contacts.

Meese's Justice Department spokesman,
Patrick Korten, denies that Meese was part of North's secret contra supply
network and notes that Meese does not recall having referred anyone to
North on contra-related matters.

In addition to North's role as contra
commander and fund-raiser, North became secret overseer of the State
Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, through which the Reagan
administration disseminated information that cast Nicaragua as a threat to
its neighbors and the United States.

An intelligence source familiar with
North's relationship with that office said North was directly involved in
many of the best publicized news leaks, including the Nov. 4, 1984,
Election Day announcement that Soviet-made MiG jet fighters were on their
way to Nicaragua.

McFarlane is now believed to have been
the senior administration official who told reporters that the Soviet
cargo ship Bakuriani, en route to Nicaragua from a Soviet Black Sea port,
was probably carrying MiGs.

The intelligence official said North
apparently recommended that the information be leaked to the press on
Election Day so it would reach millions of people watching election
results. CBS and NBC broadcast the report that night.

CLARK HAD KEY ROLE

The leak led to a new clash between the
regular bureaucracy and the president's advisers. The official State
Department spokesman, John Hughes, tried hard to play down the report,
pointing out that it was unproven that the Bakuriani was carrying MiGs. At
the same time, employees of the Office of Public Diplomacy, acting under
North's direction, insisted that the crates were inside the ship and that
MiGs were still a possibility.

To take a closer look, the source said,
North requested a high-flying SR-71 Blackbird spy aircraft be sent from
Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., to fly over the Nicaraguan
port of Corinto while the Bakuriani unloaded its cargo. The pictures
showed that the Bakuriani unloaded helicopters, not MiGs.

North was not the only adviser who
operated outside traditional government channels, investigators have
concluded.

Others were known as the RIGLET, a
semi-official unit made up of North; Alan Fiers, a CIA Central American
affairs officer; and Elliott Abrams, the current assistant secretary of
state for inter-American affairs, according to Abrams' subordinate Richard
Melton. Melton revealed the existence of the RIGLET in a deposition given
to the Iran- contra committees. The name is a diminutive for RIG, which
stands for Restricted Interagency Group.

Among the RIGLET's actions was ordering
the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs, to assist the contras in
setting up a front in southern Nicaragua. Tambs, who resigned suddenly
last year after his links to North were revealed, testified about the
instructions to Iran-contra investigators.

But perhaps the key to the parallel
government was the role played by Reagan's second national security
adviser, William Clark. It was during Clark's tenure that North began to
gain influence in the NSC.

Clark also recruited several midlevel
officers from the Pentagon and the CIA to work on a special Central
American task force in 1983 to push aid for El Salvador, a task force
member said.

"Judge Clark was the granddaddy of
the system," he said. "I was working at the Pentagon on another
issue when my boss said that because of special circumstances, I was to be
reassigned to the task force."

A former administration official familiar
with Clark's activities said Clark also had approved contacts between
Vatican Ambassador Wilson and Libya before Wilson's November 1985 journey,
which came after McFarlane replaced Clark at the NSC.

The former official said Wilson also had
carried out secret missions for the Reagan administration in a Latin
American country where Wilson reportedly maintained contacts with
high-level officials. The source asked that the country not be identified
because the system is still in place and had reduced tensions by
circumventing the regular bureaucracies of both countries.

Calls to Wilson's and Clark's offices in
California were not returned.

-----END-----

*************************************************************
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